Innholdsfortegnelse for October/November 2021 i ARTnews

“I don’t think there’s anyone who’s worked harder for the Chicano art community,” artist Margaret Garcia says of Cheech Marin in Maximilíano Durón’s feature on the storied actor and art collector in these pages. “He’s making room at the table for people who haven’t gotten the attention that others have.” It is the task of collectors to acquire artworks, but many in this 32nd edition of the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors issue are recognized just as well for their contributions. Whether the forthcoming Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture or the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, cofounded by our cover star, Dasha Zhukova, or the endowment of “Perspectives” writer George Wells of $1 million worth of art to Morehouse College, the act of giving helps raise the visibility…

George Wells is the CFO of Quip, an online startup, and founder of the Wells Group, a New York consulting firm specializing in finance and accounting for start-ups and midsize businesses, as well as an avid art collector who recently donated notable works from his collection to help support students at Morehouse College. WHEN I THINK BACK TO what has really shaped who I am today as a businessman, philanthropist, and mentor, I point to the education I received. My time at Morehouse College in Atlanta and, later, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business opened so many windows of opportunity and helped cultivate the fundamental motivations behind all my endeavors. As Howard Thurman—author, philosopher, theologian, educator, civil rights leader, and Morehouse graduate (class of 1923)—famously said: “Over the heads…

THIS PAST JULY, THE American Folk Art Museum in New York was the recipient of a generous bounty: 40 artworks by the likes of Horace Pippin and Bill Traylor gifted by former AOL Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons and his wife, Laura. The donation came about in the classic manner: Laura Parsons, a longtime trustee and generous supporter of the museum, knew that it would be transformational, as AFAM director Jason Busch later described it. Such a perfect match between donor and institution is more rare than you’d think. Often, collectors looking to donate artworks—for cultural prestige and, of course, tax benefits—approach a museum only to find that what they’re offering doesn’t mesh with the museum’s needs. The cost of storage, insurance, and conservation can make a bestowed artwork more…

Herman Daled was from a generation of which I’m not so sure there are many left. He built his collection with a desire to understand the work of the artists he lived with. I think for Herman, collecting was as much [about] supporting artists’ work as it was about acquiring it. He never lived with his works. It’s very important to think about how, with conceptual art, there is no passage of ownership. Does the work still exist? That’s a question Herman would often raise. He lived in this extraordinary 1920s house in Brussels, and it was empty, so you would visit him, and you would not see art on the walls, you’d see Herman! It was really through language and a relationship with artists that he would live with…

Is a football arena a good place to see art? It is if you’re in AT&T Stadium, thanks to Dallas Cowboys team owner and general manager Jerry Jones, just one of many team owners around the world who are also active art collectors. Jones displays in the stadium commissioned works by some of today’s most well-known contemporary artists, among them Doug Aitken, Anish Kapoor, Teresita Fernández, and Jenny Holzer, whose Truisms has been adapted to show on the 160-foot-wide Jumbotron. With an estimated net worth of $6.8 billion, Jones has the obligatory $250 million super-yacht, as well as a personal art collection that includes works by Picasso, Renoir, and Matisse. Other tycoons in the sports world have long kept out of the public eye, like Coachella music festival owner Philip…

Norman was a marvelous collector of contemporary art and a bon vivant; but conversely, he was also very serious and thoughtful. He earned a doctorate in psychology and volunteered for many years as a psychotherapist in a mental health center in San Francisco. He had a remarkable range of interests and passions. Norah and Norman Stone created an extraordinarily personal collection based on their passion for meeting artists and engaging deeply in their studio practice. They loved to be challenged by advanced ideas, and their collecting was based on a deeply held belief that contemporary visual culture should challenge convention. Some of my warmest memories of Norman and Norah revolve around annual trips that together we organized for collectors and donors to the museum. The Stones were fixtures on those…

Lending to museums is a great way to share a collection. To find out how it works, we asked one of the world’s foremost authorities: the Broad Art Foundation. Eli and Edythe Broad established their namesake foundation in 1984 as a lending library committed to making contemporary art accessible to the widest possible audience. ARTnews: Why did the Broads start their lending library? The Broad Art Foundation: For more than 50 years, Eli and Edythe Broad endeavored to deepen access to arts and culture in their hometown of Los Angeles and around the world, believing that everyone should have the opportunity to experience artists’ insights into our society and the key issues of these times. How does the shipping work? Does the institution always pay for this or does the…

WHILE TRAVELING THE GLOBE ON business trips for their banking and finance careers, Singaporean art collectors Linda Neo and Albert Lim would always make time to visit museums. Inspired by what they saw there, the couple started collecting Western and Renaissance art 18 years ago; but these days, their collecting attentions focus on contemporary art from Singapore and throughout Southeast Asia. “We feel that it is very important to support emerging artists,” Neo said, as they did with local artist Jane Lee, whose exhibition they sponsored at their gallery, Primz, in 2017. They’ve also acquired several works by performance artist Tang Da Wu, whom Lim described as “the father of contemporary art in Singapore.” Other artists in their collection include Promthum Woravut, Lim Tze Peng, Cheong Soo Pieng, Melissa Tan,…

STUCK IN REVERSE, TOKYO looks back wearily as the rest of the world looks ahead. The dissonance of the past year has changed my view of the city at least once a week. Living here is to be conscious of alternating lives that run in parallel, with days either counting down or running up. What does it mean to live in the midst of two very different global events? One is the Olympics, the pantheon of all sport, this year spectator-less and out of reach. The other is the pandemic, inescapable for everyone. Both have held up unusual mirrors to the city, and each reflection has felt either too distant or too close to fully comprehend. Questions turn to what might happen next, but there is nagging doubt that the…

OVER THE SUMMER, BRAZILIAN artist Sonia Gomes was at work on new bodies of work in various stages of completion for three different gallery shows. For an exhibition that opened in August at Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo, she was nearly done with a series of installations related to earlier birdcage sculptures in which light fixtures act as “interventions.” She was also in the early stages of experimentation with sculptural wall works that will be the basis of a show at Pace Gallery in New York next spring. But during a Zoom conversation this past July, her two-level studio in São Paulo was engulfed by pieces under construction for a show opening in November at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles. In progress were some 20 to 30 works that…

What does it take to rank among the world’s Top 200 Collectors? If there is a common denominator, it is a commitment to art that is an integral part of one’s identity. For Los Angeles–based Eli Broad, who, along with his wife, Edythe, was on this list every year from its very first edition, in 1990, until his death this past year, that commitment expressed itself in generosity—by way of the lending library he made of his collection—seasoned with more than a pinch of competitiveness: in 2015, when he opened his museum, The Broad, he told ARTnews, “If you look at art of the last 60 years, our collection is far superior to anything else in Los Angeles.” For most collectors, the centrality of art in their lives comes across…

Hans Rasmus was incredibly generous and inclusive. He was a really important part of how I got to learn about contemporary art. As a collector, he took risks, and he was very open. I think the interest in collecting came very much when he was in New York. He lived there for a while and got to see a lot of art. But he started first and foremost by collecting Norwegian artists. He followed them loyally. We’re going to do a show next summer of Synnøve Anker Aurdal. He collected beautiful textiles by her that not many people were buying at the time. When he died, I got so many letters from Norwegian artists about what he had meant to them personally and how he had followed up and supported…

Doug was a unique guy in the entertainment business. He was eloquent, sophisticated, and very cultured in a way that most people in the business weren’t. Doug collected Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly—a lot of the New York artists from Leo Castelli. Doug was collecting things that only people in New York collected. There weren’t many collectors in L.A. at the time, and Doug was way ahead of the curve. He gave a lot of psychological backing to those of us who were just starting out collecting because it gave us something to look at. It was really something we hadn’t seen before. Doug was very close to a friend of mine, Barry Lowen, who also had a phenomenal art collection. They were really out in front with the…

It was a classic tale of old meets new: Carl Thoma started collecting art in the 1970s when he worked in Silicon Valley, gravitating to pioneering digital pieces. His wife, Marilynn, meanwhile, became obsessed with Viceregal art, those artworks produced in Spain’s colonies in Mexico and South America during the 17th and 18th centuries. Altogether, the couple now owns some 1,500 objects. Both categories come with unique challenges. With digital art, it’s a race to stay ahead of rapid advances in technology while ensuring that the works remain in working order. “It’s not like going to an art gallery, buying a painting, and [taking it] home to start enjoying it,” he said. One such work, a favorite of Carl’s, is John Gerrard’s Oil Stick Work (2008), in which a simulated…

Since the $69 million sale of Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days at Christie’s on March 11, a set of devoted collectors of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, has started to emerge. The mystery buyer of that record-setting digital artwork, the online sale of which made Beeple the third-highest-selling living artist, behind David Hockney and Jeff Koons, was soon after revealed to be Singapore-based crypto investor Vignesh Sundaresan, aka MetaKovan. Using his virtual pseudonym, the 32-year-old entrepreneur and founder of the Metapurse NFT project beat out Chinese tech billionaire Justin Sun, who took to Twitter to announce he’d lost the bid for Everydays by a razor-thin margin. But the setback didn’t stop Sun from getting his art fix. Wasting no time, the 30-year-old founder of cryptocurrency platform TRON launched an NFT…

WHAT DOES Rembrandt’s Night Watch have to do with Chicanx art? For actor and comedian Cheech Marin, it was the inspiration for building a collection that could one day be the basis for a museum. In the 1980s, at the height of his Cheech & Chong days, Marin had started collecting Chicanx art. He visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and spent nearly an hour gazing at Rembrandt’s 14-foot-wide masterpiece—“looking at the painting and taking in every aspect of it,” he said—and it was then that he knew he wanted to build a museum-quality collection of his own. “I’d seen it all my life growing up, in reproductions in books, but when I got there—it was a huge, huge painting, like a mural,” Marin said in an interview from his Pacific Palisades…

African Artists: From 1882 to Now Phaidon Editors (Phaidon, $69.95) • “A lot of people still do not associate Africa with contemporary art,” 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair founder Touria El Glaoui told ARTnews in 2018. That view has been slowly changing, but this book is bound to speed things up. Consider it a comprehensive guide to the continent’s brightest stars, from photographer Malick Sidibé to up-and-coming painter Ian Mwesiga. Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern Mary Beard (Princeton University Press, $35) • With her reputation for viewing Roman history through a feminist lens, Mary Beard may be the most popular classicist in the world right now: the New Yorker earlier this year hazarded an oxymoron in dubbing her a “celebrity historian.” Focusing on…

Mr. Marx, together with some other collectors in Berlin, was one of the founding members of the Friends of the Nationalgalerie [a group of patrons who support the city’s public institutions]. He was a businessman, so he knew what he wanted. From the very beginning, he and his adviser Heiner Bastian had decided that they would go for artworks that would be part of the museum’s collection. He decided to start with what he thought were the important contemporary artists of his generation. Marx went for works by Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. A few years later, he added Anselm Kiefer. He really collected them in-depth. In the later years, Marx and Bastian added work by younger artists to the collection. The cooperation between Marx and…

Ramzi Dalloul was full of life. He must have been in his late 70s when we first met, but you felt he was in his 50s. I first met him in London eight or nine years ago. A part of me was a bit in awe of him and slightly intimidated. He was someone I looked up to—I was afraid to approach him, but he was very easygoing. He made me feel at ease. Our relationship developed over phone calls, with sporadic meetings every now and then. He collected ideologically. He would buy extensively by an artist he liked. He would buy numerous works. It wasn’t uncommon for him to go to an exhibition and buy everything, like he did with Kamal Boullata and [at] an exhibition at Berloni Gallery…

WHEN THE DALLAS Museum of Art staged a major Dior exhibition in 2019, the opening night party was hipper than usual thanks to local DJ couple Brent and Marlena English, who filled the museum’s sculpture garden, featuring works by the likes of Ellsworth Kelly, Henry Moore, and Richard Serra, with the pulsing music of Grace Jones and the sounds of French pop, light EDM, and Dallas-based electronic artists. The Englishes—Marlena, a brand image manager at Ralph Lauren, and Brent, a diversity and digital strategy manager—had been asked to DJ by Caroline Irvin, manager of the museum’s Junior Associates, a group for patrons in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who get exclusive access to the museum and its events and curators. “It’s kind of like they wanted our spirit—what we wanted…

A LOT HAS CHANGED for Russian-born philanthropist, collector, and entrepreneur Dasha Zhukova over the past decade. In the last two years alone, she celebrated a new marriage (to Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos), the birth of her third child, and her 40th birthday. She’s been spending more time in New York, where she lives on the Upper East Side, and amid all her other personal life changes, she has also been moving into the next phase of her journey as a public figure. She transformed her Garage Center for Contemporary Culture into a full-fledged museum. She started a magazine—also called Garage—that she sold to Vice Media and then reacquired. She has brought her largesse and expertise to bear on the boards of some of the world’s biggest art institutions. She has…